Assess Your Sleep

Sleep Misery Index

Cognitive Impairment

The first component involves cognitive and mental impairment. Consider the problem of not remembering where you put your keys. You must pay attention or concentrate when you put your keys down. Then, you have to store this experience in memory to retrieve it. Last, you must recall this info when you need your keys again. How often do you misplace your keys?

understanding your score

You might be stunned to realize how a simple behavior or misbehavior of this sort is directly tied to a sleep quality problem. When your brain waves are frazzled, preventing you from restoring cognitive abilities, you are bound to suffer impaired attention, concentration, or memory. As a result, you forget things and make simple mistakes in your daily life. If you scored in the medium to high range on this scale, then poor sleep quality might be a leading cause of these mishaps or mistakes.

Emotions and Mood

The second component involves the way you manage your emotions and mood. All emotions tie into mental health concerns or outright disorders; and, they are extremely important to evaluate when considering the strength and stability of your mind. Many emotions are adversely influenced when excessive brain wave activity at night leaves you sleepy, tired, or fatigued the next day.

Understanding your score

When you find yourself in situations in which you are easily frustrated or angered, how often do you consider whether you are also sleepy, tired, of fatigued? Most people do not put these puzzle pieces together. They have forgotten or never learned that a tired and weary mind yields hasty and useless solutions. It is far too easy to imagine the problem as anger or perhaps too much tension from a state of perpetual frustration. While these analyses might prove valid, how often does any one ask whether you might suffer from a short fuse due to exhaustion caused by poor sleep quality? If you scored in the medium to high range, then sleep problems may provide an important explanation for your emotional turmoil.

Energy Level

The third component measures the way you manage your energy and your activity level. It includes the classic triad of sleepiness, tiredness, and fatigue as well as many elements about the way you function day to day. When your interest wanes and everything seems like an effort, you feel slowed down and unproductive. Nowadays, depression is the first picture that might pop into yours or your doctor’s mind. Or, you might mistake the problem for boredom.

Understanding your score

Most troubled sleepers make no immediate connections between these symptom clusters and poor sleep quality. Many troubled sleepers sleepwalk through life, suffering dampened, pessimistic outlooks in which the potential for change rarely appears on the horizon. Most believe these symptoms are normal or normal aging, whereas some seek medication, such as antidepressants. It may look, smell, sound, feel, even taste like depression, but sleep disorders mimic the entire experience of depression with nearly identical symptoms and intensity. Thus, low energy is a classic feature of sleep disorders that you would not want to mistake for a mental health condition. If you scored in the medium to high range, then your energy problems may be tied directly to your sleep problems.

What it all means

The symptoms you have seen are informative because they deal with the after effects of your sleep, that is, the way you feel and function during the day. Those in treatment also benefit from tracking these symptoms to reliably monitor the way their treatment is progressing.

After years of study, we can safely say that normal sleepers typically maintain higher levels of energy, emotional health, and cognitive ability. The Sleep Misery Index helps you recognize how various symptoms affect how you think about the world, how you feel things from the world, how you see things in the world, and as a consequence, how you function from day to day.